


you I can hold, when all else falls from me

by trykynyx



Series: our worlds have never gone outside each other [4]
Category: Sense8 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-11 23:40:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9043274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trykynyx/pseuds/trykynyx
Summary: She tips her head, just a bit, to look at him. Her eyes are somehow both dark and bright, like an oil slick, and he thinks he sees something simmering in them. She knows what it is like to feel your hand curl into a fist, to feel your muscles ache for a fight, more vivid than a lightning strike. Wolfgang knows this as if she had whispered it in his ear.





	

**Author's Note:**

> It's been 84 years! But guess who watched the Christmas special and plunged headlong back into the Sense8 feels? This walking disaster. I have a million other pieces I still want to write, that may or may not ever happen, but I've been feeling restless and off-balance lately, which it turns out is a good time to write Wolfgang POV.
> 
> I can't tell if this is shippy or not, but like, welcome to the cluster, I guess, so read it however you want.
> 
> Title bastardized from Paul Celan.
> 
> trigger/content warnings: smoking, food mention, patricide mention

Wolfgang doesn’t like the summer, doesn’t like the dead time, the hot, stagnant air. He feels perpetually irritated, sweaty and sullen. It gets so bad, Felix tends to avoid him the last weeks of July, and it’s on one of these lonely days he goes into the city.

Nothing is worse than suburbia, but late afternoons with no company and no plans in the cramped streets aren’t much better. Something is tickling in his head, like an itch, like trying to make out what’s playing on a radio frequency that’s too far out of range, but he doesn’t let himself scratch it.

(His mother used to take him swimming on days like this, could see the spring in him coiling, knew that water can solve almost anything.)

So he sulks, glares at the people that don’t make way for him on the too-narrow sidewalks, sneers at the people who do. Wolfgang is all of seventeen, but he knows there is something about him that looks older, more menacing than anyone his age has the right to, something about the curl of his lip, the clench of his jaw.

(He wants to ask the people who can’t quite meet his eyes if they can smell the smoke on him, see the blood on his hands. But of course he doesn’t, of course they can’t.)

He wanders, darts in front of cars whose drivers start to lean on their horns before getting a good look at him and thinking better of it, blares the music screaming through his headphones so loud everyone around him (everyone in his head) knows they can fuck right off.

There’s nothing to do, nowhere to go, and the irritation boils and froths in his belly. He walks and walks, criss-crossing through the neighborhoods he knows his uncle runs. He does angry laps until the heat inside him is more than a match for the air scorching off the pavement, trapped between the high buildings, then moves purposely into enemy territory.

It’s not late enough for it to be a real problem, the streets are full of people getting off of work, busy with their mundane, simple little lives that Wolfgang can’t even imagine. He’s not an idiot—he doesn’t go into alleys, doesn’t really try and start something. He just wants to rile them up, the men that sit smoking lazily in front of the bar where their boss launders dirty money, wants them to see him, to know he goes wherever he pleases, whenever he pleases.

Maybe he wants to start something.

He passes them slowly (some might call it sauntering before Wolgang got his hands on them) and feels the satisfying prickle of their eyes on him. He rounds the corner already thinking about circling back for another round when all the teeth-baring rage just goes out of him. From one step to the other, he’s just another angsty teenager wallowing in self-pity and mind-numbing boredom.

(If Felix were here, and he was the sharing type, he might say something about that other thing that lives inside him, that he has lived with long before he was drafted into this fucking psychic glee club. He might try and explain what it feels like to have something so dark breathing down the back of his neck, what it feels like to have it move him like a puppet. But Felix isn’t here, and he isn’t the sharing type.)

Wolfgang keeps walking, walks right out of the neighborhoods that are divided into territories, through the weird strip of town that’s been reclaimed through a meticulous gentrification strategy which has spawned three juice shops within a two block radius and a general overabundance of kale-based products, until next thing he knows he’s practically in what passes for the financial district in this city. The radio static in his brain has gotten clearer, he’s starting to make things out, the clatter of keyboards, a high sharp note of anxiety, a desperation for a cigarette. That could be his, but he knows it’s not.

He stops suddenly, purposefully, doesn’t bother to acknowledge the startled and irritated huff of some suit that nearly barrels into him. He could turn around, walk back the way he came, even though he isn’t quite sure which way that is (telepathic GPS is one-way it seems) and call it a day. He didn’t sign up for play time, school’s not in session, he doesn’t want to _deal_ with this right now. And he honestly considers it, the idea of it so vindictive he even thinks about stopping for an eight dollar goddamn kombucha, cutting off his nose to spite his face or whatever.

But there is nothing for him back there. And the pull of whoever is at the other end of this line feels more real than anything Wolfgang has felt in weeks. He sighs, rolls his shoulders, and follows the pull. He could go for a cigarette anyway.

When he ends up heading for a service alley behind one of the tallest buildings in town, he can’t help an appreciative raise of his eyebrows.

(If Felix were here, they would make a joke about phallic architecture. But Felix isn’t here. Whatever is happening to him is something Wolfgang wouldn’t even begin to know how to explain to him.)

He’s on edge, it’s the criminal in him, he can’t help but size up every deep-set doorway, regard the cover afforded by all the dumpsters. Bad things happen to people like him in alleyways. Maybe he’s preoccupied, and that’s why he doesn’t notice her for so long. When he thinks back, he thinks it has more to do with her utter stillness.

From one second to another, he sees her: she’s all sleek lines, even he can tell the clothes she’s wearing are expensive, leaning casually against the wall next to a propped open door: Sun Bak. If he’s the unnecessary extra limb of his family’s criminal empire, she’s the overshadowed heir of her father’s legitimate one. He had noticed her, even before his mind started playing these tricks on him: there was something viscerally cathartic about seeing someone else being passed over in favor of a favorite son.

She tips her head, just a bit, to look at him. Her eyes are somehow both dark and bright, like an oil slick, and he thinks he sees something simmering in them. She knows what it is like to feel your hand curl into a fist, to feel your muscles ache for a fight, more vivid than a lightning strike. Wolfgang knows this as if she had whispered it in his ear.

Her eyes follow him as he walks towards her, hands hanging ready at her sides.

“I was waiting for you,” she says finally, as he falls back against the wall of the building her father owns, that becomes all glass and steel a floor above them, where the people who matter can see. Her voice is low and even, unsurprised.

Some mean, petty part of him thinks, ‘Oh, so I’m not your first, then?’ But he doesn’t indulge it, doesn’t need to, something about Sun is as soothing as water on his skin. He turns his body so he’s only got one hip against the wall, knows that girls like this pose, and he arches into it, teasing.

“Traffic was terrible,” he quips, and pulls his pack his back pocket. It’s more than half empty, he’d chain-smoked as he’d walked, but he instinctively pulls out two cigarettes, holds one out to her. She is waiting, hand already reaching for it, and it should be more annoying than it is, a rich girl he doesn’t even know bumming a smoke, but ‘should’ doesn’t really seem to matter anymore.

He whips out his zippo with a flair that isn’t entirely necessary, but the sudden withdrawal of anger makes him feel giddy. She doesn’t grin or anything, but her eyes do this twinkle thing that makes Wolfgang feel like he won a prize.

When he holds out the flame, her fingers curl against his to guard it from an imaginary breeze. If it was anyone else, he’d be sidling up to her with that lopsided wolfish smile that works (almost) every time. Instead, the tingle where she touches him seems to spread through his whole body, makes him feel as light as if he was floating in the pool.

They take that first drag together, deep and lazy, exhale in the same moment, as the same person. Wolfgang thinks he can feel her heart beating in his chest, can feel how tired she is, can remember the alarm going off this morning at five sharp, so he can be the first at work, knows he’ll be the last to leave, having to make Father proud—

He starts, shaking his head, blinking his eyes (which will he being looking out of, his own or hers?), and pushes back hard against the wall, the concrete centering him. When he is sure which body he’s in again, he turns to look at her, and she is there, waiting, with her eyes like the night reflecting off the water.

“I know,” she says. And in those two words is all the understanding he has needed since he started waking up confused as to who he was, what his name is. With those two words, his heart swells.

He rubs the back of his neck, takes a drag while looking pointedly away from her, there’s smoke in his eyes is all, that’s why they’re prickling like that. He can feel her behind him like she was pushed comfortingly up against his back, like she’s cradling him, but that’s ridiculous, they’re just two strangers having a smoke.

Then something beeps, clear and insistent, and when he turns to look at her again (his head has been on a swivel, look at me, please look at me, wait, no don’t look, I don’t want you to see) she’s glaring at her wrist. It’s some cutting edge Apple thing, he knows from the ads it hasn’t even been released yet. They take that long, last drag together, the kind where you are already dropping it on the ground when you exhale. They don’t have to speak, the moment is over. He definitely doesn’t feel deflated, bereft.

He looks pointedly at the watch that costs more than his car (but only because he doesn’t take his uncle’s charity, don’t cry for Wolfgang, Argentina) before meeting her eyes.

“See you around, then,” he tells her around that last mouthful of smoke. Sun rolls her eyes at him, carefully crushes the butt she’s dropped beneath the toe of her designer shoe, and there’s something endearing about the three precise turns of her ankle. She goes to the door back into the building, pulls it open, then stops.

“You should come by again sometime,” she says, and before she walks through the door, back up the service stairs, out into the marble-floored lobby and up to the office where she’s interning this summer, she looks at him again.

And something about her eyes makes Wolfgang feel like Sun sees everything: the teenager with the zit coming in on his chin, the little boy who killed his father, the monster that lives in his shadow, whatever new thing he is becoming. Something about her dark, deep eyes see him, really see him, and before she disappears into the building, she smiles.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Feel free to harass me to keep up with this series, generally cry with me about this super involved universe I've been nursing, I'm trykynyx over on tumblr too!


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